


The Boy Next Door

by resplendentRegurgitation



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Cliche As All Fuck, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-29
Updated: 2015-07-29
Packaged: 2018-04-07 10:36:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4260096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/resplendentRegurgitation/pseuds/resplendentRegurgitation
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dave Strider's childhood was just a little crooked and always bent towards the next door neighbor, John Egbert. They grew up and shit, and now Dave is gonna have to figure out just how much John means to him and it's going to feel PRETTY FUCKING WEIRD. <br/>"The blue pastels and pencils never last long."</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Boy Next Door

**Author's Note:**

> howdy pardners this is gonna be my first story on AO3 which is fairly wild and it wont be all that original or ground breaking but ive always been a sucker for predictable cliched dumb coming of age shit, thanks for being one too it means a lot.

When Dave would need to escape the house, slamming the backdoor behind him in an attempt to dam the yells rushing through the kitchen like 'HIGH' on the washing machine, he would settle himself in the far corner of the yard where the neighbor's white picket fence ended and met the overgrown shrubbery acting as a makeshift divider between others' plots of land. He would dig around the prickly leaves until he found his shoe box, a cardboard treasure chest hiding his sketchbook, pencils (including mechanical  _and_ colored), a pack of gum snatched unpaid from a gas station, a collection of a few rocks he  _swore_ were fossils found around the driveways throughout the development, and a flashlight.

To get warmed-up he would trace over and over the 'DAVE'S PROPORTY: DO NOT LOOK' scrawled on the box's lid while waiting for the trickle of loud slams and swears in the inside to die down. When he felt comfortable enough, Dave would then prop his sketchbook on his knees, pick a pencil of his choice, pop a piece of gum, and start to doodle. When dusk dusted the sky he would stick the flashlight on a particular branch in the shrub so that it's flickering light made its way onto the page. Lights around the neighborhood would simmer and fade until it was Dave's favorite time: when his notebook was alight and the world was dark. 

His notebooks would fill up until he struggled to squish in scenes along the already full margins and Dave would have to quietly sneak out of the house to walk to either a pharmacy or grocery store to slip a 99¢ notebook into his jacket, pretending to look at comic books and puzzle books for sale before leaving. 

As he would walk, Dave would watch and observe, taking note of things to draw when he got back home. Trees bending a certain way, scraped knees, clouds over rooftops, scratched up cars and crooked license plates, For Sale signs. Dave would barely be able to contain his glee while skimming through the blank pages one by one, unable to contain the joy that came with creation and concentration. He would stash his recently completed notebook with the many others under his bed and hardly ever think of it, let alone any of the others, again. 

But before even opening up a brand new spiral-bound notebook, Dave heard something. It was faint, but nothing of nature or the normal drone that came with living in a community, but a noise unexpected and new. It happened again and again before Dave realized it was coming from the other side of the white fence and, looking through the slats, saw a boy his age. This shocked Dave, for an old couple had resided next door for as long as he could remember. 

It was a boy with a shock of black hair that stuck up uncontrollably from all ends and thick-rimmed glasses that covered his face but magnified his eyes, an attack of bug-eyed blue, and the boy was immersed in his game, shooting things with a Nerf handgun.

" _Pew! Pew! Bang-choo!"_  

Yes, that was the sound Dave had heard, fake gun sounds that sounded more like rockets than anything, and he couldn't help himself from being intrigued by this boy's, admittedly, fun looking game.

" _Die, alien ghost scum! Pew! Pew!"_  

Dave shrinked away when he heard his new neighbor's backdoor open and a commanding voice saying "Come inside and help unpack, John." The boy made sure to do one last somersault assault before complacently running away from Dave and going back inside.

Dave was ten years old.

* * *

  _I'm running away, don't come looking for me.  
I hate you and I never want to see you again._

Dave would leave these notes once a week, pinning them to the fridge or leaving them atop his brother's closed laptop computer. He would sling a bag stuffed with clothes and a toothbrush over his shoulder and head out the back, stopping to pick up his shoe box before sliding between two loose boards in the fencing and walking across the Egbert's lawn to their backdoor. He'd wipe his feet on the concrete step before entering, meeting John in his kitchen. 

"And you're sure your dad's ok with you comin' over?" John would ask, casting dubious looks at Dave's fat bag and his grubby, soggy shoe box. 

"Yeah, he's fine with it. He don't care." Dave says, ignoring how John always refers to his brother as 'dad' because Dave never had the energy to explain his living situation. Heck, Dave didn't even fully understand it. But Dave was eleven and John was ten and that stuff didn't matter anyway.

They would chase each other up and down the steps and would build cities out of John's abundant Lego collection. They would watch movies upon movies and sometimes could even convince John's dad to take them to a movie rental place, a rare treat. John would let Dave play on his computer, and Dave would tear out pages from his notebook to let John draw on, scribbles his dad would hang on the refrigerator with pride.

When the knock on the door came in the evening, a succinct rap that shook Dave's core, he would hide under John's bed and refuse to come out. It took a lot of consoling and coercing from the Egberts to get him to slither out, defeated. Dave would meet his brother at the bottom of the steps, anger apparent with stiff politeness as he would grab Dave's hand and practically pull him from the haven that was next door. 

"I get no God- _damned_  respect from you," his brother would hiss as they walked. "I do and do and _do_ for you and what do I get? This  _shit_." He would pull painfully on Dave's arm, making him stagger and whimper at the audible tearing. 

Once inside, his brother would push him to spilling his box's contents and yell at him for making the mess. "Clean that up and go to your room! You hear me?" Dave would frantically nod, sniffling as he scrambled to pick up the broken pieces of lead and the pieces of rock that chipped off upon impact, his 'fossils' more so misshapen. 

Dave would flick the lock on his door, slide down its plane, and cover his ears while resting his chin on his knees. The loud bangs and garbled swear words would stutter in and out as Dave would watch out his window at a silhouette of John across the way. His curtains down, a golden illumination bathing Dave's own room in a residual glow, John would stay up until 8:00 PM until his dad came in to turn out his lights and kiss him good night. A few minutes pause and a fainter, dirtier light would drip out as a book light was turned on and John would stay up and read until 9:30 PM. 

* * *

"Ew, stop doing that, Dave!"

Dave would stop mid-crack, his arms stretched out so his hands were up in the air, his knuckles entangled in such a way to ensure pops and snaps. He would grin at John and despite knowing how much it bothered him, couldn't help himself from asking: "What? ... _This_?" Dave would crack his fingers with such grandeur that the sounds of both Dave's laughter and John's protests could be heard up at the front of the bus. 

They were by no means "popular", Dave and John. In fact, they were regarded as weird by the majority of their middle school class.

Dave wouldn't speak, his face always in his notebook scritching away. Any conversation directed towards him was ignored, and on the occasion a classmate was extra persistent, it was rumored that Dave would begin to draw their untimely death, making sure they could watch it unfold on the paper. Dave eventually acquired a pair of cheap aviators (stolen) and wore them constantly to further isolate himself from his peers, ignoring teachers' requests for him to remove them. The number of times he was sent to the principal's over those glasses were marked as tallies on the underside of his desk.

John was known as a liar, for he would always boast about how he had once seen his grandmother's ghost. He would talk about it to anyone who would listen, and on the rare instances when he could grab someone's attention, they would be pulled aside later on and told by a classmate how crazy John was and not to listen to him. John was one of few kids who had a cellphone, something of great importance during middle school, but the only thing he would do on it was look up ghost stories, both "true" and fictitious, and read them during class, the screen titled upward from under the desk. He was also known for habitually tapping pencils against his braces and staring off into space.

Dave and John didn't have any classes together during the day, but always met up in seat sixteen on the bus ride home. John would beam at Dave's doodles of the day, claiming they were brilliant, and Dave would listen intently to the descriptions of the ghosts John had seen that day and would draw the apparitions to the best of his ability amidst the bumping of the bus. But some days Dave wouldn't be in the mood for laughter and chatter and would instead rest his head on the bus window and allow his glasses to clink painfully against the pane, adding to the bruises already adorning his temple and his chin, and John would stare at nothing.

They would hop off the bus at the bus stop and John would race Dave to the sidewalk that met at the middle of their homes, and John would wave good-bye and Dave would smile. Dave wouldn't run up to his room to complete his homework like John did, but would instead head straight to the backyard and take a nap in his corner of the yard, sunglasses folded up on his chest. 

* * *

When high school arrived both boys found themselves amidst friends and passions they followed whole-heatedly: John spent as much time as possible in the computer labs (and could occasionally be seen accepting $5 a pop for breaking through the school's firewall for his fellow peers), and Dave practically lived in the art room ("What have you been working on, Dave?" "Workin' on beating my record for how much paint I can drink in under a minute.") and could be spotted skipping class, sitting outside the band room, eavesdropping. But both John and Dave convened in science classes, a common interest they loved and learned of together, although John was more into life sciences and Dave was more intrigued by the vague, bizarre, and purely theoretical scientific tidbits the teachers only gushed about on a particularly good day.

They always met in seat sixteen until John got a car for his seventeenth birthday and insisted on driving Dave to and from school. Dave would hang out at John's for as long as possible until sunset splayed across John's bedroom's floor and a light had to be flicked on to see properly. 

Dave would leave after confirming with John that pick-up time was 7:00 AM the next morning. He would contribute more scuff marks to the sidewalk between their houses, and would make sure to latch the door quietly as to avoid alerting his brother to his arrival. Dave would slink upstairs, close his bedroom door with that practiced care, and settle himself at his desk, sketchbook laid out and waiting. 

Then, he would draw.

And it would always be John. 

Dave doesn't know when it happened, when he started trying to hold John's gaze for as long as possible, how now when their knees accidentally touched he wouldn't bother recoiling, how now instead of spending so much time with John to avoid his brother, Dave sincerely spent time with John for John and John alone. 

And Dave would grind his teeth while he worked, trying to draw around the scenes of John and fellow classmate Karkat Vantas sneaking experimental kisses across the way, trying to capture how John's hands held books with such grace that it broke his heart, trying to get the lines that scrunched under John's eyes whenever he smiled just right.

The blue pastels and pencils never lasted long. 

The blue pastels and pencils never last long.

 

Dave is eighteen.

 


End file.
